elly.org

i've been reading some, and had i had a pen, i would have underlined the following parts of books i've been at this week:

"Wouldn't it be nice if all the people who are lonesome could live in one big dormitory, sleep in beds next to each other, talk, laugh, and keep the lights on as long as they want to?"

- Lenny Bruce, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People

"If you yearn for people who won't reciprocate your interest in them, you should know that your yearning for them is probably the most valuable thing about them."

- Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer

"...one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

-Joan Didion in the preface to Slouching Toward Bethlehem

a pointless weekend. the problem with going into the office a lot is that when i have days at home, i feel entitled to do very little. but even bed has lost its charm this weekend - i want to be engaged by life, but i've almost compulsively embraced laziness.

it occurred to me as i lay in bed, waking up into an almost bad mood brought on by feeling non-industrious, that i've neglected my multivitamins and vitamin b for almost a week. okay. fine. i will take them when i am done here.

i tend to brunch alone at universal cafe on the weekends, which is a combination luxury and punishment. it's usually the best food i eat all week, and i get a lot of reading done there, but on down days it can be hard to keep from radiating a sense of loneliness during this ritual, which most people do with a partner or often, it seems, with a group of manicured blonde friends.

i was reading How To Talk Dirty and Influence People over brunch, and i was at the chapter where Lenny Bruce is talking about working on a farm. so i walked home thinking about times when i did more physical labor or exercise. times when i felt healthier, lived outdoors, did yoga more often, or at least went to the outdoors many times over a summer. i haven't left san francisco or been in nature in a very long time, mostly due to money and transportation issues, which are of course entangled with each other. right now, with the exception of a trip to key west in a couple of weeks, i don't see any immediate change possible in that pattern, due to continuing work and money issues. i'm starting to try to envision a change, though.

after the neighborhood violence a few weeks ago, i started thinking about possibly moving. i'm still thinking about that and variations of that. basically, i pay a lot of rent for one person for my cavern o' dreams, and there's not really a way to afford it and also afford the rest of life without continuing to do a lot of tech work. i'm very tired of tech work, and tired of being trapped in the city, too. but i am also deeply resistant to the idea of moving again, and not convinced i could find anything more/as awesome and cheaper anywhere in SF. so what would i do, leave san francisco? but what i'd really like is to go back to school and live somewhere more peaceful and foresty and be able to just write and take pictures and space out. BUT i don't know that i would be as interested in doing those things if i was away from my muse, san francisco, and my friends here, for very long. so i'm really torn and confused as to what the right path is.

a strange gift about being single, though, is that at least i can mull these decisions without the added confusion of taking into account what my person wants too.

i don't know. i feel really aimless. it's sort of like depression but i think it's more like just lack of purpose.

I became obsessed with making a very elaborate 404 page for my site. Once I got the idea I couldn't stop. First I thought I'd just do one random card on the 404 page, then I thought, well, three would be better for a full reading. Then, once I showed it to a few people, they responded with, okay but what do the cards mean?? So then I added meanings. 78 cards in a tarot deck - I uploaded them all by hand and cut and pasted in the meanings from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.

For Drupal nerds: I made a custom node type with an imagefield for the cards, and a custom field for card meaning. Then I just made view with sort criteria set to 'random' and limited to show only three nodes and only the fields I wanted (card, title, meaning). Imagecache resizes the cards (the originals I uploaded are higher res). After that it was all theming - a very minor amount of views theming and some css and jquery for display.

It would be fun to create a whole tarot reading site - I like the idea of uploading a bunch of different decks and letting people enter specific queries, and storing past readings for people and things like that. However, I have plenty of other crap going on. But.. it's a very enticing idea.